“I know what you’re saying. It was the same with the mouse in the pantry and the opossum in the crawl space.”

“You want me to kill the clowns?”

“No! You didn’t believe me until you saw them yourself. You didn’t want to acknowledge the problem. That’s how it always is with you. You ignore the problem until it—”

“Makes a balloon animal and honks its horn?”

“Shut up. This isn’t going to be like last time. You’re going to acknowledge that we have an issue here.”

“I took care of the opossum.”

“But first you treated me like I was crazy.”

“Well…”

“Stop. Don’t talk right now. You don’t know what it’s like. You leave every day. I’m here. I know this house. I know those woods. And then you come home and act like you know everything that happens here. Well, you don’t know. You don’t know at all. You have this illusion of control, like, ‘Nothing seems wrong now, so everything must be fine! No clowns in the woods and I’m not going bald at all!’”

“You could do this without resorting to—”
“Stop. Just stop. If you can’t handle this with your big, strong ‘I have a secretary, an expense account, and I just started P90x last week’ arms, then—”

“Wait, what?”

“Then I’ll just call the police.”

“No. Wait. (Sigh). So, what are we talking about here? Like a Bozo the Clown or something more like Mr. Noodle?”

“You’re doing it again.”

“No, no. I’m just trying to get a handle on this. If I’m going to fight this thing, I need to know if I need something more than a flower that squirts water and a bucket of confetti. (Krusty the Clown laugh) Hi, kids!”

“Stop it. Seriously, just shut up.”

“Fine.”

“Gacy was a clown. You know that.”

“I know that.”

“John Wayne Gacy was a CLOWN.”

“Dennis Rader was an installer for ADT. Should I be worried about our home system?”

“Dennis who?”

“Rader. BTK. Bind. Torture. Kill. ADT installer. Look it up.”

“Stop it.”

“Jeffrey Dahmer worked in a chocolate factory. You CERTAINLY don’t seem too worried about that.”

“Wow. Just wow. It’s like you’re just trying to be cruel.”

“No, wait. I’m just saying—”

“You’re just SAYING it’s fine for you to drink three or four scotches—SCOTCH, SCOTCH, SCOTCH!—to relax, but if I have a square of dark chocolate at bedtime—which is HEALTHY, by the way—that I have a weight problem.”

“No, that’s not what I said.”

“It’s what you meant.”

“No, I meant…Dahmer ate people. He had a problem. Very fatty. Not lean at all.”